Chris Foss: The Joy of Starships

Hulking, weather-beaten starships spewing fumes, trailing cables and sporting colours as brash as those of any poisonous insect: Chris Foss's illustrations of a heavily industrial future are immediately familiar to a generation of British science fiction fans.

So it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that Foss is not himself much of a science fiction fan. It turns out that one reason his covers notoriously bear little affinity with the books they adorn is because he could rarely bring himself to read them.

"My heart used to sink," he tells me by phone from the Channel Island of Guernsey, "because a lot of them in those days were 'Grot pressed the splicer and went into Zurg drive'". He much preferred commissions where he could give his imagination free reign. "My favourite art director used to just phone me up and say, 'Chris, we need another Asimov'. And I'd say, 'Oh right, what do you want?' And he'd say, 'Well, the last one was blue; give me a green one.' And that was it. That was the brief. No hassle reading the book or anything like that."

(Image: Chris Foss)

So if Foss isn't interested in science fiction, how did he end up painting so much of it? He originally aspired to be a strip cartoonist, admiring how skilled illustrators could fit a scene into a space not much bigger than a postage stamp, and drew a scurrilous political strip for the Guernsey Press while still studying art at Cambridge University in the early 1960s. But his big break came from an unexpected quarter: Bob Guccione, publisher of the pornographic magazine Penthouse.

Foss sent Penthouse a speculative pitch shortly after its controversial UK launch; Guccione promptly commissioned him to produce a regular strip, later putting the young artist on a retainer when he left his job as an assistant to other artists. While the strip was predictably centred on adult concerns, its backdrop of "quarries and monsters" drew on Foss's surroundings - and foreshadowed the direction of his later science fiction work.

Foss grew up amid half-derelict fortifications dating back to World War II, as well as copious artefacts of the mining and marine industries which dominated Guernsey's post-war commercial life. His impressions of those surroundings - along with the steam trains which he used to watch venting smoke from the vantage point of his uncle's high-rise London apartment - are evident in many of his science fiction illustrations.

But those illustrations might never have existed had it not been for Guccione's interest in science fiction. He would later become publisher of OMNI, which first published now-classic SF stories by luminaries ranging from William Gibson to George R.R. Martin. It was at his urging that Foss went to see Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A space odyssey. "It left me sitting bolt upright," says Foss, "because here suddenly was deep space, ultra-realism."

2001's elegant space clipper and waltzing space station bear little resemblance to Foss's space-going tramp steamers - but the film nevertheless galvanised the young illustrator, whose knack for illustrating without photographic references made him a natural for science fiction art.

British science fiction paperbacks of the time frequently had covers decorated with little more than abstract swirls. So Foss's ability to paint distinctive, yet convincing, spaceships, robots and planets was seized upon by publishers. "Suddenly, I revolutionised book covers," says Foss (who does not come over as a man who believes in hiding his light under a bushel).

Demand ran high: at his peak, Foss was turning out three covers a week, totalling more than a thousand over his career. And he was also doing illustrations for advertising agencies and concept art for movies including Ridley Scott's Alien, Alejandro Jorodowsky's unproduced Dune and Richard Donner's Superman.

This hectic work rate had more to do with economic necessity than artistic vision - Foss was still in his 20s and had a young family to support. However, the artist does profess to bore easily, forever looking for his next idea. "Everything is a forward movement," he explains, "so, if you like, I stamp forward on the skeletons of old ideas." Indeed, Foss disposed of much of his original artwork as soon as it had served its purpose, often giving it to anyone who expressed a liking for it.

(Image: Chris Foss)

But despite his efforts, publishers needed more paintings than he could produce. Other artists with similarly gritty styles soon emerged to fill the gap: Foss cynically suggests that most of his rivals (whom he doesn't name) did little more than produce cheap knock-offs of his more genuinely innovative work. A more charitable interpretation might be that he was at the vanguard of a new wave in British science fiction art; Peter Elson, Tony Roberts, Chris Moore and Angus McKie all became prominent figures around this time.

Foss has also taken umbrage at appropriation of his work at the other end of the artistic spectrum. In 2000, the artist Glenn Brown was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize; controversially, the works he exhibited included enlarged near-copies of illustrations by Foss and other science fiction artists. (You can see Brown's versions of Foss's pictures here and here.) Foss says he had distractedly given Brown permission to homage his work while working long hours on Stanley Kubrick's AI, and professes to have been surprised - and outraged - by what he saw as the subsequent plundering of his art.

Brown's image only existed, Foss says, because he created it, "and this man gets all this kudos from basically lovingly repainting it." The affair reminded him of the fuss made over the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose vastly enlarged comic-book panels were first attacked and later celebrated by critics. "I was fairly incensed," says Foss. "What about the artist who created the damn thing? Because they were so skilled, really adept at using screens and things."

The loss of the originals and profusion of lookalikes is challenging for Foss enthusiasts. Together with Foss's daughter Imogene, Rian Hughes, himself a celebrated illustrator, edited Hardware, a handsome new collection of Foss's SF work. "He'd send me down all these images that he'd found on the internet, and I'd say, 'not mine, not mine'," recalls Foss, "and then he'd text back: 'Actually, Chris, it is yours. It's got [your signature] 'F' on it!'"

Foss's website also does a brisk trade in prints and posters painstakingly reproduced from ageing transparencies. He seems somewhat surprised by his work's enduring popularity: fans too young to have seen the originals form long lines at his occasional signings, while their older and more affluent counterparts pay handsomely for faithful copies of his classics - sometimes too faithful for Foss's liking.

"The originals don't exist, so they're paying me to recreate them, which is the very devil," he says. "Technically, it's a form of art forgery. You know, a painting that took two days now takes two years because I could clean it up and wipe out all the defects. But they want it just like the original."

That's forced Foss to return to the airbrush - a tool whose use in illustration he pioneered, but abandoned years ago. These days, he prefers to paint with conventional brushes and oils, which allow him to pursue his life-long obsession with figure work - an area of illustration in which he's actually made a wider, if less widely publicised, mark on society than through his science fiction work.

A highly successful by-product of his Penthouse work was a commission to illustrate The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort's blockbuster guide to love-making. While the book's now somewhat dated, and its prejudices and prescriptions are occasionally questionable to modern readers, it sold in huge numbers throughout the 1970s and wielded huge influence; Foss mischievously describes it as "seminal" and is still proud of the work he did for it.

Foss is still interested in erotic work - and with career and family pressures off, is free to pursue that interest. "I can more or less do what I want really," he says. "I've got quite a nice little setup: you know, I've got my studio here in Guernsey, and later on today, I shall just go back and paint models, to be quite truthful!" While he says he'd like to combine it with his science fiction work, he accepts that's not a view shared by most of his fans.

So with his career as a science-fiction artist mostly behind him, is there anything Foss wishes that he'd worked on? "Mad Max," he says unhesitatingly, before launching into a lengthy and lyrical description of his personal vision for the post-apocalyptic thriller that made Mel Gibson a star.

"I would probably have had two machines charging each other like giant dinosaurs in a contest," he says, with his characteristic disregard for the film's actual content. One would resemble a huge swordfish, he explains, while the other would be "a bit like a sort of land-based aircraft carrier - crossed with a chainsaw!"

Book information:Hardware: The definitive SF works of Chris Foss by Rian Hughes and Chris FossTitan Books£24.99